This townhouse is the birthplace of one of Napoléon’s favourite generals, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (nicknamed ‘Sergent belle-jambe’, on account of his shapely legs). Now a museum, the house explores the strange story of how Bernadotte came to be crowned king of Sweden and Norway in 1810, when the Swedish parliament reckoned that the only way out of the country’s dynastic and political crisis was to stick a foreigner on the throne.
The present king of Sweden, Carl Gustaf, is the seventh in the Bernadotte dynasty, while several other European royal families (including Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium and Denmark) are all ruled by Bernadotte’s descendants.